The Internet We Choose to Build: Can We Make Better Futures by Making Young People Play? | Unboxing Internet Infrastructures Toolkit Launch
About the Event
Join us for The Internet We Choose to Build: Can We Make Better Futures by Making Young People Play?, featuring the launch of Unboxing Internet Infrastructures: The Environmental Costs of the Internet and What You Can Do About It, the latest module in The Pranava Institute’s Unboxing Tech Toolkit series.
Sending a message, streaming a video, or prompting a generative AI tool may appear effortless, but each action depends on data centres, fibre-optic cables, semiconductor supply chains, electricity grids, water systems, and other physical infrastructure. As digital technologies expand, their demands on energy, water, and critical minerals also grow, while affected communities often remain absent from decisions about how these systems are designed and governed.
This event foregrounds these concerns to collectively ask:
What kind of internet are we choosing to build and what place does the planet, and communities hold as we navigate these decisions?
This event aims to bring together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, educators and civil society organisations to examine how democratic participation, community capacity and public engagement with climate discourse can shape the future of digital infrastructures and lead us consciously into a better technological future.
Programme and Speakers
Opening Keynote | Greening Artificial Intelligence and Infrastructures
The keynote will explore how investment in skills, practical learning, and community participation can enable young people and communities to shape a resilient and environmentally responsible digital future.
Resource Launch | Unboxing Internet Infrastructures: The Environmental Costs of the Internet and What You Can Do About It
The Pranava Institute will introduce the toolkit’s eight interactive worksheets and demonstrate how play-based learning can help young people investigate the physical infrastructures and environmental systems behind the internet.
Partner Spotlight | Unboxing Internet Infrastructures Across Diverse Contexts
In this segment, our implementation partners from India, Cambodia, and the Philippines will share lessons from facilitating the toolkit with young people across different social, cultural, linguistic, and educational contexts.
Plenary Discussion | The Internet We Choose to Build: Can We Make Better Futures by Making Young People Play?
The plenary will explore democratic participation in infrastructure governance, building technological capacity with communities, play-based learning as a means of fostering agency, and storytelling as a method of public engagement.
Speakers for the event:
Rajnesh Singh, Chief Executive Officer at APNIC Foundation
Osama Manzar, Founder & Director at Digital Empowerment Foundation
Gabe Mercado, Executive Director of Vivita Philippines
Namrata Srihari, Co-founder of Vyūha Learning Labs
Check out this space as we announce more information on the stellar line-up of speakers for this event soon!
About the Project
Unboxing Internet Infrastructures is an open-access multimedia educational toolkit that makes the environmental impacts of internet infrastructure understandable and actionable for young people through interactive, play-based learning.
The toolkit comprises eight interactive worksheets, facilitator guides, blogs, and curated resources that help participants understand how the internet works, examine its environmental consequences, and identify pathways into internet governance. The project also includes a Changemaker Blog Series and a curated resource library on digital sustainability, community power, and the future of the internet.
The project has:
Engaged more than 410 young people
Trained 60 facilitators
Conducted workshops across India, Cambodia, and the Philippines
Produced translations in Hindi, Kannada, Khmer, and Filipino
This module of UTT is supported by the APNIC Foundation through ISIF Asia and the Ian Peter Grant for the Internet and the Environment. The Unboxing Tech Toolkit is a project that TPI has been building since 2021, with a vision to build hands-on resources for young people aged between 12-20, focussing on unpacking the technology that they interact with on the daily. Earlier modules have focussed on persuasive design, materiality of the smartphone, and our tech choices and the plant.
About The Pranava Institute
The Pranava Institute is a New Delhi-based trans-disciplinary research organisation that works at the intersection of emerging tech, society, policy and design to shape sustainable technological futures. TPI’s work spans two verticals: Digital Economy and Tech Geopolitics, as well as Technology, Society, and Design. Our areas of work include Responsible Deployment of AI in the Public Sector, Governance of Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs), Critical Minerals Supply Chains, Semiconductors and Electronics Manufacturing, Trust and Safety Online, and Youth and Digitalisation. We believe in building on India's unique social, cultural and epistemic context to shape emic technological futures.